NOTES BY THE WAY 163 



and you find it a mere inanimate ball, that suffers 

 itself to be moved and rolled about without showing 

 signs of awakening. But bring it in by the fire, 

 and it presently unrolls and opens its eyes, and 

 crawls feebly about, and if left to itself will seek 

 some dark hole or corner, roll itself up again, and 

 resume its former condition. 



A GOOD SEASON FOR THE BIRDS 



The season of 1880 seems to have been excep- 

 tionally favorable to the birds. The warm, early 

 spring, the absence of April snows and of long, 

 cold rains in May and June, — indeed, the excep- 

 tional heat and dryness of these months, and the 

 freedom from violent storms and tempests through- 

 out the summer, — all worked together for the good 

 of the birds. Their nests were not broken up or 

 torn from the trees, nor their young chilled and 

 destroyed by the wet and the cold. The drenching, 

 protracted rains that make the farmer's seed rot or 

 lie dormant in the ground in May or June, and the 

 summer tempests that uproot the trees or cause 

 them to lash and bruise their foliage, always bring 

 disaster to the birds. As a result of our immunity 

 from these things the past season, the small birds in 

 the fall were perhaps never more abundant. In- 

 deed, I never remember to have seen so many of 

 certain kinds, notably the social and the bush spar- 

 rows. The latter literally swarmed in the fields 

 and vineyards; and as it happened that for the first 

 time a large number of grapes were destroyed by 



